Where the Heart Wants to Be
by Kanthia
Summary: The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that you can't yearn for something you already have.


**Where the Heart Wants to Be **  
Word Count: 3,850 (Holy banana noodles!)   
Pairing: Shipshipping  
Rating: K+  
Disclaimer: Camelot belongs to Golden Sun and all its characters. Even Agatioh, who has strange anklets.

Inspired by old songs, lively conversation, and those wonderful people called nakama.

_/Piers doesn't mind talking about things he's lost, because he has something better now._

* * *

The more he thinks about it, the less he wants to think about it. 

It's not like he can forget. That old senator's words still ring in his head like the resounding of ages- if he chose to do what was right, he would never be able to return. He believes he chose right; and yet there is a hole in his heart to know that he no longer has a Home.

Death and disease were uncommon at Home, and yet he lost both his parents to the monster with the long sickle. He has no parents, no Home, only these four strange people who keep him company. An old man who is down in the galley possibly looking over his books, or perhaps sleeping, thinks about how much he misunderstood the dead land they had recently visited. A girl with hair red as blood braids his hair in neat pleats to shield it from the dirt so common on the shores that wait the boat. Another girl with narrow eyes and short, blonde hair sits across from him laughing while trying to guess his age. A proud, tall young man stands at the prow and watches the lighthouse grow larger on the flat horizon.

He used to curse that wave, but it opened his eyes. Here, in the world of eighty years of a life, things happened- adventures were had, love was made and lost, wars were waged. And he is beginning to think that he loves this more than he loved the slow useless life he lead with his brethren.

Sometimes, when the sun is high and curses his white skin to deeper browns (the two girls chattered endlessly about this), he learns pain. He never knew pain back at his Home. Here, he licks the blood from where it flows from his head or nose or lips and learns to scream the animalistic cries given by the three around him- he found it strange at first, but it gives them strength to dive and plunge and fire and call out the power within and seek the blood of the enemy again and again and again.

But the battles are always won when the four of them are together. He has known the exhaustion and has learned the trust of revival. He has discovered the base fear of facing death and the simple, magical things called hope and faith.

* * *

Sometimes, when the sun forgets and the sky is dark as Home was, he will be sitting up in the hammock in the men's quarters. His male companion, the Earth-User, is sometimes sleeping and sometimes awake, sometimes staring out the window and sometimes talking softly with him so as to not wake the old man who needs to rest. He has learned of a different Home, one sitting at the base of the most wonderful of mountains. The Earth-User can tell him little. He does not remember much. 

And then at other times one or usually the two girls will come into his chambers and he will wake to the sound of the opening door of his beloved ship. The brown-haired boy will wake as well; warrior's instincts. The two girls will sit on the floor by his hammock and giggle to one another like the best of friends. They engage in lively conversation about fights and battles and how silly people look; he tells them stories and they listen with wide eyes. They engage in childish games; the four of them sit in a circle on the floor as they laugh through Water Spout (a game from his Home) or the myriad of games with flat pieces they call Cards that Earth-User and Flame-Bearer learned from their childhood. Eventually night calls to them. Before leaving they always ask him about his age; he refuses to tell them time and time again. If he did, they would no longer come and keep him company during the lonely nights.

When the Flame-Bearer comes alone, her face is wet with tears and her brother pretends to sleep as he takes her into his hammock and sings old songs from Home. He never had known the touch of a woman's breast or the chill of tears with a heart-shaped face buried into his chest before meeting her- after two or three songs, her sobs quiet down and he tells her that she is with her brother now and that the Fire Ones are gone everything is okay.

She tells him that there are other Fire Ones, and that she doesn't care about them anyways. They never scared her.

He tells her that she should not worry, one day they will find the others who seek to stop them.

She tells him that she is scared they will have to fight.

He tells her that they are friends from their Home and would never intend to hurt, and then she smiles a little and asks to lie with him until she feels better.

She's been coming alone less frequently lately, and sometimes when she does come alone it is without tears. He'd like to think he's responsible for that.

* * *

Wind-Bringer once asked him to teach her to swim. She did not have a Home as far as memory could serve, but grew in a small desert town without any water nearby. The four of them stripped to their undergarments and under the watchful eye of the aged man, plunged into the cold waters together. 

He learned that day that Earth-User feared the touch of cold water. Flame-Bearer never had told him why, but she said that it was the first time he had ever leapt into the sea since the day he died. Wind-Bringer corrected her; he had leapt once more into the sea after that, though she refused to say anything more than that it was the day that she almost drowned from a great distance up in the sky.

Time heals all wounds, Earth-User had said in his quiet and soft voice before moving his arms gently and turning away from his sister's almost naked body. His face was the colour of her hair and they all laughed gently with him.

Wind-Bringer had small, thin limbs. Kicking his legs to stay above the surface, he had taken them tenderly with her back pressed to his. Her eyes are the colour of sunset; her hair is the colour of sand and her skin, smooth as polished shell. She had giggled nervously and squirmed a little to get more comfortable. He had spent an hour to teach her the basics of survival in the water. Her body had learned everything else in the transfer of his pounding heartbeat to her cold back.

They had gone swimming, the four of them, every day they could since then.

* * *

He had once woken Earth-User when the wooden door creaked at dawn. He went out almost every morning to watch the sun rise; back Home, the sun never rose nor fell so brilliantly like blood and fire in the sky. He heard the footsteps of receding ages and turned to the young boy who had saved him from imprisonment. 

The boy never says much, but silence is always enough.

The chestnut of his hair was soaked with sweat that morning and his face was pale to complement the cold of sunrise. He mumbled something about a nightmare and gave a quiet apology. Water had eroded away at cold stone as he gently asked his friend to tell him what was wrong.

He still marvels at how alike Earth-User and Flame-Bearer's night terrors are. He has never met the Fire Ones, but he has witnessed the stealing of parents from small, insecure hands. That linked the four of them with the kind of bond that is never broken.

He had whispered to the young boy that back Home, to touch a man was not strange. Earth-User understood and he brought the shivering teen into his bare chest. To graze with fingertips the muscles in his arms, strained from yesterday's battles, to feel the pounding blood-giver pressed to his chest- he missed the sunrise for the first time that day, and he has never regretted it.

* * *

The aged man is interested in him. He supposes that the man himself isn't to blame; the scholar was brought up every day wishing to meet someone like him and to see his Home. 

He can't imagine anyone whose body is so uncooperative having so much energy. True, the scholar cannot join in them in battle- he was never trained to hold up large pieces of crafted steel and he was not born under an elemental Star- but he does not brood nor whine. Perhaps there are moments of insecurity, of feelings of foolishness, of wondering if his old body slows down the important mission; if there are, he does not bother the children with these silly beliefs.

He listens with the wonder of a child to stories of Home. Stories of crushing boredom, stories of ageless apathy, and stories of a civilization that once was great. He's never understood why the man loves to hear stories of such uninteresting things but he supposes that the threat of prolonged life would make any human feel safer and more content with the looming sickle.

In turn, the old man tells him stories. He did not remember much of his Home but he did know much of the thieving mayor-ruler of Tolbi. From a different point of view, he was a kindly old dictator who raised the scholar like a son. The man seemed to be enamored by the slight thief and loved to speak well of him despite them only learning of his death scant weeks ago.

Once or twice, he's heard the old man- younger than him, but older by experience- up at night, crying soundlessly. He can hear the currents of salty water but never really understood how much emotion they could contain.

It's at those times that his heart seizes in his chest and he prays to Iris that the man would live to the next sunrise, because if the scholar passed away there'd be no-one left to listen so eagerly to stories of Home.

* * *

Once, he got sick. 

There were diseases on the mainlands that Home had not had the gall to experience for millennia- he had no natural resistance against them- and the methods of preparing foods were just as barbaric as many of the cultures. It had first come after a night at an inn in some strange southern place, probably Apojii, when he had finally made up his mind to join in the festivities. His packaged rations from Home were about to run out and he was hungry and stupid enough to try his very first piece of dead Cow.

A steady diet of fish and bland vegetables for the whole of his life (not to mention all of the equally bland lives that came before him) had done little to help him afterwards. The exotic fruits and juices, the elegantly prepared seafood, the strange spices that made his mouth and throat dance had been lovely. And when his stomach was full and Flame-Bearer was somewhat drunk on base alcohol which looked nothing like the fine wines from Home (according to her brother, it was her first time), she persuaded him to try a little skewered dead Cow flesh.

He had never been as sick as that night on the ship. A combination of 'common' mainland bacteria and a body unaccustomed to red meats had combined to cause his stomach to violently reject him.

He remembers little, but he remembers enough. If memory could serve then the night would have been filled with terrors, with damp cloths on his burning forehead, with his chest heaving, with his stomach twisting and turning and slowly emptying itself into a carefully positioned bedside pan.

It is comforting that he remembers nothing of this. None of the pain. None of the suffering that had not been experienced by a man from Home in ages upon ages. When he recalls the memory, he sees her forest green eyes as she casts him to sleep away from nightmares of hurt, his deep brown eyes furrowed in trepidation so uncommon on the stone of his face that makes him alive, her chocolate-on-lavender eyes above thin lips stammering out stories of Home she remembers him telling her just to keep him conscious (which angered the caster of sleep to a certain extent).

When he looks back to the dark night of stories and sleep, he can't help but smile and wish he was sick for a little bit longer.

* * *

They considered him the closest thing to a doctor, which was what made his meat-induced illness so much more difficult for the group to deal with. He administered (with the help of the old man) basic first aid and looked after them with or without the help of Psy. However, as the ship's doctor and cook, he has always considered upholding nutrition to be his most important task. 

The younger sister, for example, is a picky eater, while her older brother still suffers the occasional backlash of what had been quasi-malnourishment for three long years of his life. The small one has changed the most. Wind-Bringer was thin and naturally weak; her bones were rather prone to breakage and her muscles were easily strained. Still, in the month or two that had passed since their arrival on his ship and him guiding her towards a more nutrient-rich diet than the poor diet of desert folk, she's changed. No longer is she the terrified yet overly confident young girl she used to be. The dark circles under her eyes have all but vanished and the spaces between her ribs are less deep. She smiles and laughs more often and he even once caught Earth-User teaching her how to wield a light blade.

Nutrition and food is one thing.

His people and the people of the mainlands are different in many ways and similar in many more; muscle mass is one of the stark similarities. Apart from the fact that his people tended to be more lithe and lighter-built than the barbarians, there is little that differentiates physical strength and the ways of acquiring it.

To a barbaric fool, physical training meant lifting heavy things and putting them back down again- a waste of time. To the men from Home, physical training meant slowly moving up and down, up and down- a bore, but if you did it for a day without stopping it yielded some results. He had never understood what the reason for this slow dance was.

His appearance and build were nothing to be ashamed of; he was naturally gifted in these areas, but had never expected that he would be in the want for more. His knowledge of human anatomy was rather vast. His understanding of how the parts of the animated corpse functioned was vast. His insight to the base desires, the needs and wants of humans was less accomplished.

There is the pleasant memory of what was perhaps two days before reaching Home for the first time since the Wave that he had caught the dark young boy clanking around at dawn. True, sunrise was passed, but the sky was still awash in gorgeous pinks and oranges and yellows.

The boy was tan, testimony and subject to the pallet of sky and dawn of soul. Blanket to the white of skin blanched in the moons of Home. He'd been puzzled and transfixed watching as his younger friend practiced with a sword too heavy to be the kind normally carried, mocking the movements of battle. Shirt discarded. Muscles dancing in symphony just under the surface of the skin, smooth and lean yet rippling like wind on dunes of sand under the tear-stained moon. The strain was evident, yet at the same time everything was too gentle.

A gentle application of applied force.

Earth-User noticed him and became red in the face; apologizing profusely, muttering that he again couldn't sleep. He waved it away with his hand and discarded his shirt. Apologies were for men who had reasons to be ashamed of their bodies, and he was interested in learning how to become as confident in battle as this boy who trained in the morning.

* * *

The girls once whispered through giggles that he had cute eyes. He had paused halfway through a messy stitch (the youngest member was trying to teach them all to sew with interesting results; in the desert, it was a vital skill, but at Home it was left to the women and more bored individuals) and asked them to repeat that statement. 

They did so. Tossing her flame-coloured hair, the older one said that he had a distinctive colour, to which her companion noted that she had only used that word because she had recently learned it in a tavern. The blush given afterward matched her tresses.

He had spent most of the following hour staring over the side of the ship for those momentary lulls in the wind when he could catch his face. It wasn't as though he had forgotten how to conjure a pool of water to reflect, he was just…uninterested in seeing his visage for long periods of time.

It had surfaced the uncomfortable memory of his imprisonment soon after the Wave had carried him away from Home; in the town of wherever the inhabitants had been afraid of his strange hair and eyes especially, saying yellow was the colour of evil and pirates were evil. It was wrong to be labeled that way. And yet to have two young women laugh so pure-heartedly and run around him like it was a game, bidding him to join in their fun- for that moment he had cast aside those fancy words like gold and saffron and accepted yellow as perfectly fine.

* * *

He's never sat down and told them just how he felt the first time he saw them. 

He'd been sitting in that cell for hours, and it had been like Home in some ways and not in others. To amuse himself, he had been watching the water dripping down the sides of the cave and snaked his own small trails around them. Tiny slivers of water; too small to be noticed and pointed out by a barbarian, and too small to keep him entertained.

A man whose lover had been injured in the recent pirate (how _dare_ they relate him to such men!) attack was grating on his nerves for the thousandth time that day. He was saying things that really shouldn't have been insulting but that was two thousand 'You evil pirate…'s ago and six thousand 'I'm gonna beat you up!'s ago. In a haze, he spat out some words and cast Flume despite knowing that he was doing something unbelievably stupid.

At least he had scared them away, and was alone to sit on the ground with his back resting on the bars of the cell contemplating freedom in loud words inside his head. He had the slight headache of either too much mildew or a Jupiter Adept reading his mind.

He spun around rapidly to face four strange intruders; a man who by Home's years would be centuries but was probably perhaps eighty years, a dark-eyed young man with long hair and a slight build, a lovely young woman with red hair and a wide-eyed girl of perhaps fifteen. They were looking into his cell without words. The silence was thick enough to fold in with eggs and bake into pastry. Blueberry pastry, or perhaps elderberry pastry.

Their eyes were beautiful, almost as beautiful as the King's.

That's what had attracted him to them at first. Not stories, not strength, not their bodies which were beautiful each in a unique way. Not their powers which were similar to his. It was the fickle Goddess of Chance who had brought them together; it was their eyes that sealed the deal. Their eyes reminded him of Home.

* * *

Kontigo, or something like that. 

They were to land at Atteka, find the village of Kontigo and then make their way to the spiral tower that he can see growing in the horizon.

"Piers," says Jenna after a dinner that even he had surprised himself by making so lavishly, "Do you ever get- are you homesick?"

"Why? I was- we were just at Lemuria a few weeks ago."

"Well, um-" She puts down her fork and knife from the fresh sea bass and looks at the contents of her lap. "I was thinking- about how Conservato said you can't go back home if you helped us."

Felix, over at the small sink that runs on collected and semi-filtered rainwater, looks over his shoulder. "Jenna, you shouldn't be asking him those things."

Sheba was making a face at the colourless leeks on her plate gleaned from the markets in Lemuria. "Yeah, Felix is right. They'll remind him of his moth-" She abruptly stops, puts a hand over her mouth, and breathes out slowly. "I'm sorry, Piers."

"It's okay," he says, before realizing that he means it.

"But really," interrupts Jenna, adamant. "Do you think you'll miss your home?"

_Does he miss Home?_

A warm room, a full stomach, caring friends. Maybe they were making a little sense when they talked of Homes and Hearts.

"How could I miss something that I have right here?"

* * *

_kanthia writes: _

_Hey! Kanthia here, from the Land of One Piece fandom with her very first Golden Sun fanfiction since...well, since the "Holy cheesecake Saturos is alive and he meets this girl who is a Venus and Jupiter and Mars adept who is Imilian, Proxan and is actually part of an ancient Proxan legend involving her and Saturos having teh secks!1!11!1one" thing I wrote about a year ago.  
_

_You have my full permission to ignore that ;-;_

_Neeways, Golden Sun fandom is awesome! As I was typing this, I realized how similar One Piece and Golden Sun are- one involves seven hormonal teenagers on a ship, and the other involves eight hormonal teenagers on a ship. But you guys are smart enough to name your pairings...except that I can't remember them all! Gah! (And please forgive me for laughing at 'Lighthouseshipping'. It's too cute)  
_

_But I think I invented some pairings in here. Let's call it Shipshipping, and thanks to Kora who is reminding me to tell you guys I __so call 'Bananashipping' for Kraden x Piers which really should be 'Oldshipping' or something. Omg their love is so forbidden._

_Wait...don't tell me. Let me try to remember.  
Warped Mudshipping  
Um, Steamshipping  
And- uh...Seabreezeshipping?  
_

_Yeah, I'll be quiet now. This is my first real Golden Sun work, done mostly at ungodly hours of the night while having a 38 degree fever. It's Piers. It's delirious. And it's a hell of a lot similar to One Piece...which I apologize for. I took a couple of liberties_._ At some points, the similarites got so close that it was a struggle not to use the One Piece-only word 'nakama'- that's where I've used 'friend' even though it sounds so awkward._

_Thanks a ton for reading! If you have a little time, drop a review. I'm interested in knowing how OOC I managed to get everyone. Heh._

_And no angries for Piers, because I'm more used to it than Picard. Sorries!  
_

_/Kanthia_


End file.
